Port Arthur blueswoman comes home a legend

*Story by Dan Wallach
For all the time Becky Barksdale has spent as a professional musician — which is most of her adult life — she’s never played a gig with her own band in her hometown of Port Arthur.

That’s about to be checked off her bucket list on Saturday when the Becky Barksdale Band plays the Lamar State College-Port Arthur Theatre Performing Arts Center, just one day after her induction into the Museum of the Gulf Coast’s Music Hall of Fame.

That’s a busy weekend for the 1979 graduate of Thomas Jefferson High School, who got her diploma 19 years after Janis Joplin.

It’s not as if her music or style invites comparisons with Janis, she said. Unless someone knows Barksdale’s hometown is Port Arthur and connects that with Joplin, it doesn’t come up.

Barksdale has played gigs in Southeast Texas before. She was in a group called Taxi, among others. But half a lifetime ago, Barksdale decided to try her luck in Los Angeles, got session work, played clubs and got noticed.

She toured with a band called Canned Heat that got its start somewhere in the 1960s and still was a going concern in the 1990s.

“They let me get in front and play a few of my songs,” she said.

Barksdale had a good rep as a guitarist and singer and was invited to a closed audition for a performer named Michael Jackson who’d had some success with an album called “Thriller.”

She was hired for Jackson’s “Dangerous” tour in the early 1990s.

“They needed a roots guitarist,” she said.

Roots indeed.

Becky Barksdale performing with Michael Jackson

Her roots developed from her grandfather, James Ware, in Port Arthur, who held his granddaughter on his knee while he played songs on his ukulele.

When she was 12, he gave her an acoustic guitar.

“It was never on my radar to play lead on a Michael Jackson tour,” she said. “He was a great to work for. I saw how things operated on that level. I learned a lot about stage performance and seeing the world, but not just seeing the world. Kings and queens are hanging out with you.”

Barksdale’s drive these days is the blues and her vehicle is the Becky Barksdale Band, a “power blues trio” composed of herself on guitar and searing vocals (check out “Handle Me With Care” on YouTube and then think how much Alicia Keys would love to sing like that), drummer Luke Perry (The actor? You’ll have to come to the show to find out, she said), and bassist Ethan Thompson.

“I’ve been playing with these guys for about 10 years,” she said. “It is so much fun to play live. It’s the real deal. It’s a free form of music. You can go anywhere — it’s the fundamental of rock.”

Playing Port Arthur will be a new experience for her rhythm section, but it’s October and they won’t get the full effect of heat, humidity and bugs. And no mudbugs, either.

“I was hoping crawfish were in season,” she said.

Barksdale isn’t just playing clubs in L.A. She also composes scores for movies and provided a version of “Amazing Grace” for “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — The Beginning.” She contributed to “Mission Impossible 3,” Disney’s “Cars,” and music for UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship).

She also played a small role in 1984 as a waitress at the Palace in the Beaumont- and Port Arthur-shot movie once called “Sno-Line” but later retitled “Texas Godfather.”

Barksdale said she is just as satisfied with behind-the-scenes jobs as she is on-stage.

“I like doing both,” she said.

This weekend, Southeast Texans will have the opportunity to see her out front.